Official Diablo 3 2.0.5 Patch Notes

Official Diablo 3 2.0.5 patch notes have been released by Blizzard. The patch is going live in the US now and will be live on EU tomorrow.

GENERAL

Increased the radius of “Strength in Numbers” (multiplayer buff) from 100 to 200 yards

Gold Find on items will now stack multiplicatively with the Gold Find bonus provided from game difficulty

This significantly increases the gold reward most players will see when playing on higher difficulty levels or wearing Gold Find gear.

Example: Suppose you are playing on Master (+200% Gold Find) and have 50% Gold Find awarded from items. A pile of gold drops that would normally be 50 gold. Your Difficulty bonus increases the 50 gold to 150 gold. Your 50% Gold Find will now increase the 150 gold to 225 gold.

The 300% Gold Find cap applied to items and Paragon Points has been removed

The Vote Kick system has received several changes to make it less restrictive:

Vote Kicking is now available after you have been in a game for 2 minutes (down from 5 minutes)

After a boss kill, vote kicking is disabled for 15 seconds (down from 3 minutes)

Some additional restrictions were also relaxed

Known Issue: The tooltip will not reflect these changes

Tyrael will now chat about his poor eating habits with less frequency

CLASSES

Barbarian

Philosophy

To better support character builds based on a specific damage type we are changing the damage type of a few select runes. This is an ongoing goal – additional changes may be made in the future to any of our classes to make damage types an interesting consideration for character building.

Rend is being changed to make the damage more consistent. The difference between getting a Critical Hit or not on Rend made the ability too unpredictable. This is particularly important when the player has the option of reapplying the Damage over Time effect.

Finally, we are buffing the least used Fury spender – Seismic Slam. While there will always be a least used skill, we feel the aesthetic of Seismic Slam is very strong, and we would love for more people to enjoy using it. To this end we are making the skill mechanically easier to use as well as directly buffing the damage.

Rather than rolling for a Critical Hit, Rend will now calculate an average damage augmented by your Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage on application and apply that damage evenly over the duration of the entire DoT

Note: Since the skill can no longer deal a Critical Hit, it will no longer trigger effects that occur on Critical Hit.

Crusaders should be the toughest class in the game and currently they are not. We’ve increased the 15% damage reduction to 30% to match that of the Monk and Barbarian. In addition we are removing the movement speed penalty on Heavenly Strength while also changing Fervor to be a very strong passive for Crusaders who want to play with a 1-handed weapon. Together these changes should solidify the Crusader fantasy of a powerful tank wielding a giant shield.

To better support character builds based on a specific damage type we are changing the damage type of a few select runes. This is an ongoing goal – additional changes may be made in the future to any of our classes to make damage types an interesting consideration for character building.

Akarat’s Champion has been redesigned. Many of the runes were lackluster while Rally was both too strong but also promoted a style of play that consisted primarily of mashing buttons mindlessly. We’ve redesigned Rally and buffed the skill and all the other runes.

Overall builds that used certain skills such as Judgment – Resolved could do solid damage (though somewhat inconsistent), but if you did not take specific skills or have access to specific Legendary items the damage would fall behind. We are nerfing Judgment – Resolved significantly. A change this large is never easy but this was a mistake we should have caught.

To keep Crusader damage competitive we are buffing most of the Crusader’s damage abilities across the board. While a few skills have come down slightly in damage, the vast majority are being increased, some by a large margin.

Fist of the Heavens and Blessed Shield both fill a similar role of being ranged multi target skills. In order to provide better differentiation we are adjusting Fist of the Heavens to be better at damaging a single target, with the area damage component being a peripheral bonus. To this end the damage of the primary strike of Fist of the Heavens has been increased, while the damage of the secondary bolts has been decreased.

Finally, we have done significant redesign to the Crusader’s passive abilities. We feel there was an overall lack of interesting passive choices on the Crusader. Rather than try to simply change numbers on existing passives we’ve tried to provide interesting and compelling choices.

Demon Hunter survivability is lower than we would like. While the Demon Hunter is not as tough as other classes, this can be frustrating when taken to an extreme. The change to the Awareness passive is a first step; we will be keeping an eye on this and making additional changes as needed in the future. The Marauder’s Set bonuses are attractive, but often the pets would get in each other’s way or Sentries would not use your spenders often enough. To help improve this set’s functionality, Companions have received collision box revisions and the rate at which Sentries use your Hatred spenders has been increased.

To better support character builds based on a specific damage type we are changing the damage type of a few select runes. This is an ongoing goal – additional changes may be made in the future to any of our classes to make damage types an interesting consideration for character building.

We want to give Monks more options for spending their Spirit. The damage on Wave of Light is being increased to encourage its use as an alternative to the existing popular Spirit spenders.

To better support character builds based on a specific damage type we are changing the damage type of a few select runes. This is an ongoing goal – additional changes may be made in the future to any of our classes to make damage types an interesting consideration for character building.

We are changing the way Fetish Sycophants works. Previously it triggered while casting. This caused it to create twice as many fetishes with certain skills such as Firebats (which trigger on-cast effects at double the normal rate), and also create fetishes even when there was no target available. We want to preserve the existing Fetish builds while allow Fetish Sycophants to be combined with all skills in the Witchdoctor arsenal. Fetish Sycophants now works with all skills and triggers on hit rather than on cast. While this means you can no longer get fetishes by simply casting at nothing, you will now get more fetishes if casting against large groups of enemies. In the case of spells other than Firebats, you will generally get more Fetishes than before. In the case of Firebats, you will get less Fetishes than before versus 1-3 targets, and more fetishes than before when facing groups of 5 or more.

Haunt and Locust Swarm are being changed to make the damage more consistent. The difference between getting a Critical Hit or not made these abilities too unpredictable. This is particularly important when the player has the option of reapplying the Damage over Time effect.

The Witchdoctor sometimes had trouble keeping up in a party situation. At the same time, we feel each class should feel unique. To this end we are redesigning Fierce Loyalty to improve the Witchdoctor’s mobility in a uniquely Witchdoctor way.

Rather than rolling for a Critical Hit, Haunt will now calculate an average damage augmented by your Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage on application and apply that damage evenly over the duration of the entire DoT

Note: Since the skill can no longer deal a Critical Hit, it will no longer trigger effects that occur on Critical Hit

Rather than rolling for a Critical Hit, Locust Swarm will now calculate an average damage augmented by your Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage on application and apply that damage evenly over the duration of the entire DoT

Note: Since the skill can no longer deal a Critical Hit, it will no longer trigger effects that occur on Critical Hit

Now also increases your health by 20% in addition to your Zombie Dogs and Gargantuan

Wizard

Philosophy

To better support character builds based on a specific damage type we are changing the damage type of a few select runes. This is an ongoing goal – additional changes may be made in the future to any of our classes to make damage types an interesting consideration for character building.

Wormhole is by far the most common rune choice on Teleport. While we like the functionality and frequency with which it allows you to cast Teleport, we do not like the frustration it sometimes produces: players are often left clicking wildly, feeling punished for misclicks, or increased frustration if you find yourself up against an obstacle that wastes your second and third Teleport. To improve this experience we are reducing the cooldown on Teleport to 11 seconds and changing Wormhole to only give one additional cast, but increasing the window of time you have to use your second Teleport to 3 seconds. This affords the same number of Teleport casts overall as before while allowing you to be more thoughtful and deliberate about how to use your second Teleport. With the base cooldown on Teleport coming down to 11 seconds, all runes should now be more appealing. While the effect on some runes has been reduced, this should be more than made up for by the reduced cooldown in all cases.

Overall it looks good, needs a bit more tuning on the DH skills though compared to the other classes. I may whip up my WD for a while until they give some love to the DH for other builds except fire (step in the right direction for cold but we need more)

Would of loved a rebalance of the loot drop chances but perhaps they did that but haven’t told anyone and won’t publicize it.

That’s what I use FA as my spender with now HA-DA as my generator. We’re still lacking some runes in other skills though. Like pets could use variations in elements, caltrops, marked for death, etc. Too many of the DH skills are one element only which kind of limits builds a bit. And they need to balance item properties out so that we can get cindercoat type items for other elements too.

“It is no longer possible for the same affix to be randomly selected as the replacement for both of your new rolls” – as I understand, both new enchant affixes cant be the same “When Enchanting an item, the original affix will now be forced into the pool of possible replacement affixes” – if you reroll , say move speed on legendary bracers, there will be chance to reroll that affix again.

First: If you enchant an item, the affix you are throwing out can only appear in two of the three available options. (One being to keep the old roll.) Thus you may get one higher or lower roll on the same affix, but won’t get the situation of all three options being of the same affix you’d wanted to roll out.

Second: When rolling out affixes on legendaries that are not typical for the item slot (like increased movement speed on amulets, for example), the affix will be rerollable now. Up to now this wasn’t possible and a legendary couldn’t reroll a distinguishing affix (, just loosing it forever), as the Mystic was limited to affixes available based on slottype only.

Although it indeed frees up much needed stash space, I did like the hunt for the best baseitem to craft. Having another tab of stash available would’ve been prefered.

Just D2tinted glasses? Maybe. But imho whiteys lacking a purpose again is not a good thing. Could fairly be striken out of the game past lvl20 else. So I am hoping that Blizz has something else in mind for whiteys to be of use again. And as I’m not seeing anything on this patch, it’s hopefully included in 2.1, which hopefully isn’t far away either.

On the changes I’ll withhold my opinion for now, as I want to experience how they’ll play out, first. The community “events” that were datamined seems to be preparation for now, as they’re not included in patchnotes, though. (Although they could be a “surprise” from Blizzard to activate serverside to get the hype up before, or in waiting for Patch 2.1…)

This leaves room for clearing questions, though. And as a soloplayer, who is in neither community nor clan, I’m wondering if these will be becoming a necessity to be in now.

So please Elly and/or Flux, ask your contacts at Blizz, if soloplayers without interest in joining communities/clans are still catered for by Blizz, or if joining them is expected to get the full playing experience further on?

Hmmm… I wonder how much of an effect the changes to Fist of the Heavens will have. Personally, I loved the AoE aspect of it. I’d hate to think that my whole build and all the time & resources I spent item crafting/enchanting hasn’t been a complete waste of time.

And still no real love for the Monk. My oh my, what a surprise.

Still, I like a lot of the additions. Overall pleased, but… dang, I hope FotH still works well.

Previously I had experienced the skill as a good AoE skill for medium strong or weaker trashmobs and for weaker basetypes of rare/champion/elite mobs. Against strong trashs or medium or strong basetypes of r/c/e mobs, though, it was lacking a bit of punch. If the crusader else wouldn’t rely on cooldown skills so much, this wouldn’t be a problem. But as he does so, any setup incorporating FotH would still need a solution for stronger, individual enemies, while their BFGs batteries are reloading, to keep being viable in higher difficulties. Upping FotHs initial damage and balancing down the bolt damage could thus play out quite nicely in the end, perhaps even resulting in a much smoother gameplay overall. (Just under three hours waiting time left – if Blizz is on time, of course.)

Update to my earlier comment. Blue clarified that you CAN get torment-only items from caches found in T1. The patch notes meant that caches found on t2-t6 get bonus odds to score legendaries (of any type).

So they’d buffed Barbs best skill 😀 Since it’s mine favorite I can’t be more happier. Honesty “Will now ignore line of sight blockers (such as the walls created by the Waller monster affix) when dealing damage” was the only change I felt was needed.

I never understood, why Blizzard ain’t graphically toning down skill effects from rare and champion packs and the elites minions, to reduce cluttering the screen with effects a bit more? With the obvious exception of the Frozen affix, increasing the mobskills opacity would do the job just fine, leaving just a wee bit to fintune to make them easier to distinguish from an elites, purples or boss skill in use.

Appart from cleaning up the screen a bit, this would additionally be good as an indicator on where to run through or where best to stay for applying channeled skills, when fighting more than one pack spamming the screen again. The most dangerous attacks (, from the enemies packing the biggest punch rankwise, ) would be easily distinguishable then, which opens up a slight window for playerskill making up for the lack of a characters power.

And even in the case of attracting new mobs offscreen, it appears more funbringing to me to see an offscreen elite through its use of skillaffixes, then the current breaking out of concentration on the action, just to take a look in the chatspace when something happens to keep an overall overview on the situation I manouvered me into. (On a sidenote: Especially gobs are easy to miss in the clutter sometimes, thus are right now in need of a better anouncement when engaged anyways.)

Silverfang

PS: Lost my red line in between. I hope my viewpoint still translates, though…

I have a bad feeling they’re going to be changing skill elements until the end of time. “Everyone’s using fire skills, change that skill from fire to cold!” “Nobody’s using lightning skills, change that skill from fire to lightning!” Boy did they open a new can of worms w/ that one.

Otherwise, not too bad. It is kind of sad that Torment 1 is now lumped into the “don’t bother” difficulties, maybe they need to make T1 harder so it can get similar scaling rewards. Now T2 is the new T1, until T6 is the new T5, or something.

If the goal would be, to end up with skill elements that are more logical on the associated skillrunes than the current ones, I’d be happy over each and every change there. But I got a similar feeling as you there. Not that I think they’re doing this to keep us changing our buildes over and over, but I do get the feeling, that their trying to distribute elements more evenly for every character, be it logically or not.

Every character being able to be specialized in every element he wants to, is against my roleplaying sense to begin with, though. And although I do want more character developement options to specialize in, I experienced these changes in the recent patch there as a method to narrow down the number of working atypical skill setups to as few as possible, already, and honestly would prefere more logical distinctions between the characters. (In short: The roleplaying part of D3 is far too thin already. I’d like more roleplaying elements and distinctions in D3, please.)

This could lead to characters being easier to balance out, though, and could be Blizz way to still try to finally get a fun PvP developed and implemented. And although I’m no PvPler per se, I do would like different PvP-experience available as an option to me. Integrating these into Clanfights and -rankings would be a sure incentive, to get even an oldschool soloplayer like me into both…

This is probably the only bad thing about this patch. I don’t understand this elemental homogenization either and I don’t like it. I mean it does give us more options in a way, but depending on the exact change it can also eliminate some by braking up skill combos that worked effectively together because of matching elemental types.

The pessimist in me have a really bad feeling that changes like this will be used to break up builds after other balance changes failed to do so. The problem is that we can easily and instantly switch out skills when their damage fail to meet our expectation after a patch, but when elemental types change we’ll likely need new gear, which isn’t quite that easy to replace.

To be clear, my main problem is that the patch notes said that this will be an ongoing change. Honestly, that’s an absolutely terrible way to handle this. They should get this over with as quickly as possible, because if there’s a chance that we’ll have replace our gear after every patch in the coming months then I just lost the will to play. Ladder resets will have the same effect of course, but in that case we’ll be given a choice to participate, now the resets could be forced on everyone.

I have a bad feeling they're going to be changing skill elements until the end of time. "Everyone's using fire skills, change that skill from fire to cold!" "Nobody's using lightning skills, change that skill from fire to lightning!" Boy did they open a new can of worms w/ that one.

Except that’s not what they’re doing at all. They’re just changing some of the most common damage types (usually Physical) to some of the less common types for each class to give more options. Have any Fire (generally the most popular element thanks to Cindercoat) skills been changed to something else? On the other hand a number of new Fire runes have been made.

Why does every character be able to use (or specialize in) every element?

For the wizard, this makes sense. For the Demon Hunter, the possibility to change elements according to the enemies approaching would make more sense, though. (Although I’ve got no idea how this could possibly be realized, atm. Will be kept in mind, though.) The Witch Doctor should roleplaywise be specialized in Poison, Physical and Fire, though. And the Crusader should be lacking in Physical damage options while completely lacking Poison, thus being concentrated in Holy, Fire and Lightning. (As I’m never played Barb and Monk, my opinion there isn’t including any insights on how they’re playing themselves ingame. But I would concentrate Barb on physical, with a bit of fire and lightning in the mix, while I would like the Monk based on Lightning first, Holy skills second and just rounded up with just a few Physical element Runes in between.)

While this sounds great in theory, in practice it creates the issue of stuff like +Poison on a Barb weapon when the Barb has no Poison options. Unless they go the smart drop route on elements too (maybe not a bad idea?), as long as items can have all elem types, all classes need to have *some* use for each of the elems.

That’s pretty much how the game already works. Each class is limited to four or five of the seven damage types (DH and Monk have five, all the others four) and that + elemental skill damage is part of smart loot rolls, right?

By my quick count, the Monk had four Holy runes changed to something else, and four something elses changed to Holy. So it’s break even, except all the Holy runes that were changed were for one skill (Wave Of Light) while the four runes changed to Holy were in four different skills.

So while the total number of Holy runes is unchanged, they are spread among a greater number of skills, giving Holy builds more meaningful diversity.

True, but 3 of the 4 added Holys are primary which, well, I’m not gonna stack Holy for added primary dmg. And the 4th is Cyclone Strike which is either a terrible skill or a skill I totally don’t understand. So I’d say in the end there are less *useful* Holy options.

Hey, until they get the enchanting bug, please don’t try enchanting set items. The pool of affixes includes skills from other classes. Just wasted 5 souls trying to get meteor damage on my Crimson’s boots, and I kept getting rapid fire, and shield bash instead.

Hey, until they get the enchanting bug, please don't try enchanting set items. The pool of affixes includes skills from other classes. Just wasted 5 souls trying to get meteor damage on my Crimson's boots, and I kept getting rapid fire, and shield bash instead.

Do you know if this bug lets you roll afixs that do not usually show up on the item slot?

Woahoo. This destroys my build (justice for wrath generation and judgment/resolved + hand of justice + Ararat champion for champions/elite). Too bad but it really felt powerful so I was expecting a Nerf — though I did not talk about it on forums so Blizz did no see it 🙂 The nerfed everything, even the wrath generation on Kormac…

Most the changes are good, but the massive change in elemental types has totally screwed half my characters. Why can’t a Crusader focus on Holy? Was it to much?

How about a Witch Doctor, they already have more than enough Cold, now add in tons more Cold and Fire? Really?

Demon Hunter only gave my character minor fits..but still these changes not all affect my current skill sets, which I am fine by finding better replacements, but the gear I acquired, re-rolled based on current damage types is now all for not.

I have no issue with a loot game, until it requires me to just redo what I just did. Why the constant change? I hope it is done.

Im confuse, what happens if you’re using a weapon with fire damage and a melee skill that does cold. Do you wield both types of elemental damage with the same amount of damage total, do you do 1/2 and 1/2 or does one element take precedence based on what they are coming off?

Iirc, if the skill has an element fixed, all damage while using the skill is converted into damage of the respective element, independent of type. If a skill is Physical to begin with, though, the weapon would translate it’s own damage accordingly.

On procs depending on specific elemental damage types used, though, Blizz had said that the weapons elemental damage would still count there. So having one his weapon with firedamage, for example, would still have a chance to proc a firemeteor, even if the skill used was a cold skill and all damage was converted to cold damage in the process. (Could be that it’s the same on element dependant passive skills, but have neither tested this, nor validated Blizz announcement to begin with.)

“If a skill is Physical to begin with, though, the weapon would translate it’s own damage accordingly.”

That was the case two patches ago, but not anymore. Now our skill’s damage type always overwrites our weapon’s, even when using Physical skills.

However, you are correct in that for procs the elemental type of our weapon still matters. For example, the Fulminator can proc with any skill, because it has lightning damage (so don’t reroll it to something else). Also, these elemental effects still show up in death animations for enemies when you’re using a Physical skill, even though the damage calculation in that case is a 100% Physical, meaning that only bonuses to Physical will increase your damage.

The damage type of your weapon is generally irrelevant, except maybe to Wizards stacking Elemental Exposure debuff, etc. What matters is the ‘white damage’ (the stated min-max damage range displayed underneath your big DPS number on the weapon info). This is the ‘weapon damage’ value that gets multiplied by your skill/rune and multiplied again by bonus damage to elemental skills affix on gear.

BARBARIAN “TAKING HITS No other heroes can shrug off enemy attacks the way that barbarians do. Their massive strength allows them to equip heavy shields, and their flesh deflects oncoming blades and teeth like metal armor.”

CRUSADER Patch Notes Philopsophy: “Crusaders should be the toughest class in the game and currently they are not.”

This is Bullshit. Barb was and still is advertised as the toughest class and now they come up with this pisspoor philosophy. Bullshit.